Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party set for the Jungle Theater
Mar 8, 2012

Harold Pinter's celebrated play, THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, appears at the Jungle Theater for the first time and features an all-star cast, including Richard Ooms and Claudia Wilkens as Petey and Meg Boles, and Stephen Cartmell as Stanley Webber, the lone lodger in the Boles' shabby English boarding house. One of the great black comedies of the 20th century, The Birthday Party will be on stage April 6-May 13 at the Lyn-Lake theater, 2951 Lyndale Av. S., in Minneapolis.

From the very start, Stanley senses danger when two mysterious strangers (Tony Papenfuss and Martin Ruben) arrive on a day that his landlady insists is his birthday. What do these men want? Who are they looking for? And what's inside their briefcase? The only other party guest turns out to be the attractive next-door neighbor Lulu (Ivey Award-winning Katie Guentzel) and after a few glasses of whiskey and a game of blindman's buff, Stanley's innocuous birthday party turns into a totalitarian nightmare.

Harold Pinter's play is at once funny and frightening in its study of the individual's imperative need for resistance. Joel Sass directs this deeply political and timeless classic written by Pinter in 1958. Winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, Pinter (1930-2008) is also the author of The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Old Times (Jungle 1993) and Betrayal (Jungle 2006).

Sass said, "The Birthday Party is a rare event and very germane to our cultural landscape." The play had been on his radar for a long time but because of what he calls the "current, scary partisan discourse," the time now seemed right to stage Pinter's pitch-black comedy of menace, which hasn't been professionally staged in the Twin Cities since the Guthrie's 1986-87 production (also starring Claudia Wilkens). "It'd be easy to compare Pinter's 'Party' to something hatched up by David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino with its absurdist mix of humor and horror," said Sass. "But in reality, there is an overlay of power and politics, which makes Stanley's bizarre world more terrifying than anything they could imagine."

Sass is also the scenic designer for The Birthday Party. His creative team includes Barry Browning (lighting design), Annie Enneking (fight choreographer), Andrea M. Gross (costume design), Lucinda Holshue (dialect coach), Samantha Johns (charge painter), C. Andrew Mayer (sound designer), John Novak (props and stage management) and John Stillwell (technical director).

The Birthday Party performances are Tuesdays ($20) and Wednesdays ($28) at 7:30 p.m.; Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. ($33); Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. ($38); Sundays at 2 p.m. ($33); and Sundays at 7:30 p.m. ($28). Senior, student and group discounts are also available, and half-price rush tickets are available every night of the week 30 minutes prior to the performance for $10 off the regular price. Tickets are available at (612) 822-7063 or online at www.jungletheater.com.

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